Video: Finessing theme design

Now is that magical moment when we bring together all that we learned to make our site truly complete. We have all the pieces here, and normally you'd be perfecting more as you went. But in my rush to demonstrate how things worked, I have left some pretty ragged edges. Let's be honest, the site is not really functional right now. This video cleans up all those edges, and gives us a site that we can truly be proud of. Now, I'm going to do all of this very quickly, both to save time and to give you an idea of what working with Drupal Gardens is really like in a production environment.

Author Tom Geller demonstrates how to create and publish a complete web site with the powerful tools in Acquia's hosted service, Drupal Gardens. The course shows how to leverage the pre-built page layouts and add custom styling using the ThemeBuilder tool; integrate rich site features, such as surveys, user ratings, and media galleries; and push content to Twitter and Facebook. The course also covers transitioning from a Drupal Gardens site to a self-hosted Drupal site. Exercise files are included with the course.

Finessing theme design

Now is that magical moment when we bring together all that we learned to makeour site truly complete.We have all the pieces here, and normally you'd be perfecting more as you went.But in my rush to demonstrate how things worked, I have left some pretty ragged edges.Let's be honest, the site is not really functional right now.This video cleans up all those edges, and gives us a site that we can truly be proud of.Now, I'm going to do all of this very quickly, both to save time and to giveyou an idea of what working with Drupal Gardens is really like in a production environment.

I've already done a little bit of it.For example, I removed some blocks that are here in the left-hand column.We're going to keep this Need guidance, and Newest tours block, but we'll getrid of the rest of the stuff.What I really want in the middle of the page is just this one bit of informationhere, Explore our world your way.So first we'll get rid of this bit of text up here by editing it and removingit from the front page.Of course, you could also un- publish it or delete it, but this is howI'll handle it here.

I don't think that I want to have anything in the right column.I'm going to really open this up.So I'll take this block and Configure block, and move that out of Sidebar B.Now I want to mention another way of doing this would be to go up toStructure and then to Blocks, and then you can move a whole bunch of blocksaround all at once.But I've already done most of that work.I'll refresh the screen. Great!It's already looking a little better.Now one other thing I noticed when I went back to Google Chrome, as I'll doright now, is that because it doesn't have that information up here that showsup when you're logged in,this guy's head turned into a little like mushroom head, instead of being like this.

So I'm actually going to remove this user menu from here.Of course, as we were creating this site, what we should be doing is looking atit in a variety of browsers while logged in, while not logged in, and so on.But for now, I'm just going to remove it. Go down and save.Now every time I come back to this page, I have this little help message.That's something that's not normally going to be showing to people,so I always reload after I see that so I can see the page more the way peoplewill actually see it.

Now let's take care of some things that have been bothering us for a while.For one thing, the sidebar should really end with this graphic line here.So I'll click Appearance and change some of the borders and spacing.I'm going to do that in a few different phases.This is where I start playing around with the way that the page is actually laid out.I actually find it a lot of fun, but it can be frustrating becauseyou'll change one thing,you'll go back, you'll change it again, and you'll see that it changed more thanyou expected, as you'll see in a moment.I click Styles > Borders & Spacing, and then again, I have to find thecorrect area to do.

I happened to know that it's the content area. And let's play with the padding a little bit.Nope, that's the whole thing. So let's try the margin. Aha!I have the wrong part.So what I need to do is look in here. Yup!That's what I want: main, not content.Maybe it's the margin. Is that what I want?No, maybe it's the padding. Yup!That's what I want.As long as I'm doing that, I'll add a little bit of padding on the right-hand side.That makes the text rewrap, and gives us this nice little bit of white space over here.

I'll publish that, and then before continuing on, I'll do something that Ialways like to do once in a while.I'll save it under a different name.This will be called exp_cal_final_01.Of course, the way things work out there'll probably be final_02, final_03,and then final_final.You know how this goes.You know, now that this site is more together,I think that I would rather not have that logo in the side.

I want to have it back in its original position.Now you remember, we moved it down there for design reasons, but designs change.So the first thing I'll do is I'll close out of my Theme Builder, go back tomy page and remove that block, scroll down, and move it out of Sidebar A.Reload the page again.Already it's looking a lot better,but I still do need that back up here in the corner.I click Appearance, and I'll put it back to its traditional location--that is to say the natural location that you get by clicking Appearance andthen Brand and then Logo.

Now, I cheated here a little bit as well.The original logo was actually taller than these people's heads at the top, andso we ended up with a big gap underneath it.So what I did was I went into an image-processing program and I made a slightlysmaller version. And that's going to be our final logo, and publish it.Now let's see how that looks.Close out the Theme Builder and then reload the page. Aha!Now we're getting somewhere,but in doing so, we exposed the little bit of a flaw with this header graphic.

You see we have it on repeat, and furthermore we have a little bit of spacedown here we don't want.We also have a gap here that really shouldn't be there.So what we have to do is pull all of this stuff together, and then I thinkwe're pretty much done.Let's go back into Appearance, and once again we're going to be playing with theborders and spacing.We click Styles > Borders & Spacing, and then we have to play around again, as usual.Let's see. We don't see any padding here in this header-inner, so we will remove alittle bit of the styling.

We have a margin up here at the top.That's probably the margin above here.Let's see. It starts out as 9.Yeah, oh I think I'll leave it at 9.That doesn't look so bad.Let's try the header itself.Now we have some extra padding down here at the bottom.Let's see what happens when we change that. Yup!That helped a bit.Of course, we added some margin over here, that 32 margin, in order to fix the graphic.If we take that out, you'll remember.So we'll leave that as it is.So we keep clicking around.Sometimes if you have extra space and you don't see it in the part that's above,sometimes you'll find it in parts that are below, like this navigation bar, or even down here.

There could be some extra padding in there.So let's take a look all around there.The navigation Bar, well, there is nothing around the navigation region.Let's take away this content and ul, nothing there, and maybe navigation. Aha!We have an extra 54 pixels there, so I'll bring that up.Now, we're in business.We still have this thing below.So once again, I click below, and indeed we have additional margin there, and aborder we don't need.At this point, I'll publish it again, just to see what it looks like, and close it out.

We actually look pretty good at this point it.Now let's be honest, the site still isn't perfect.It's clear that we could go on like this for quite a while, honing the site'sedge until it's razor-sharp.For example, we didn't really go in very deep with the content, and the menusystem could really use an overhaul.But I meant to make this video just as something of an inspiration.You now have all the skills you need to make a truly professional-quality website with Drupal Gardens, or to convert a comp design, or a wireframe intosomething that really works.

There are still some important maintenance skills to learn,but if you've watched this entire course from the beginning, you should feelreally good about what you've done so far.The sites you'll soon create for yourself are proof of your accomplishments.

Learn by watching, listening, and doing, Exercise files are the same files the author uses in the course, so you can download them and follow along Premium memberships include access to all exercise files in the library.

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Learn by watching, listening, and doing! Exercise files are the same files the author uses in the course, so you can download them and follow along. Exercise files are available with all Premium memberships.
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